Fanfics about Nuclear Waste Storage

[jesse_the_k]

This is a 10,000-year rabbit hole!

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) was designed to store radioactive waste in Nevada. The storage area would not be safe to enter until 10,000 years had passed. Several groups of smart people came together to design warning messages that could outlive our civilization and protect future explorers. These designers knew they couldn't rely on any current language surviving that long, so they worked on landscape designs that project "this is toxic waste, don't mess!" Listen to the 99% Invisible podcast episode (or read the transcript there) for the current state of the WIPP, and the design process for the warning symbols:

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-year

I learned about the WIPP through several Metafilter posts. One of the discussions mentioned Yuletide, and wow there are some fascinating fanfics on the topic.

My recs:

The Green Cats of Desolation City by Serenade http://archiveofourown.org/works/8887861 Languages change, inscriptions fade, but cats are forever. As the 99PI podcast explains, this solution came through unofficial channels.

The One and the Many by Clocketpatch http://archiveofourown.org/works/8796376 Excellent far future SF story. Outworlders come back to Earth, pair up with human-descended ambassadors, and try to dig through a mass of culture conflict and desert rock.

The Long View and the Short by AstroGirl http://archiveofourown.org/works/8803036 Well-written and sad, this story pinballs between various "now"s and how the people of those times interact with the WIPP.

Pyramid Schemes by primeideal http://archiveofourown.org/works/5475131 In true Yuletide tradition, it's a 5 + 1 fic, exploring how a Linda and a Jo couple up near the WIPP, with five levels of failure and one success.

One of the forbidding-landscape proposals is incorporated into California, a meh dystopian novel published by a non-genre writer in 2014. If the WIPP project follows up on the experts' suggestions, elements of those proposal should be showing up in pop culture for millennia.

The WIPP-fic tag: http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Expert%20Judgment%20on%20Markers%20to%20Deter%20Inadvertent%20Human%20Intrusion*d*dd%20-%20Sandia%20Labs/works WIPP Discussions on Metafilter:

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. - March 2002

Do not dig or drill before 12,000 AD - January 2008

This Place Is Not A Place Of Honor - September 2013

A Clock That Tics Once A Year - August 2015

Comments

[mdlbear]

Thank you! Haven't read the fanfic yet (except for the little ficlet in the report), but the report itself (http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/921382.pdf) was a good read.

[jesse_the_k]

It's a remarkable project! The Svalbard Seed bank is the only other institution I know of involved in truly long range planning. Shades of Hari Selden.

[mdlbear]

The other long-range project I know about is the The Long Now Foundation. The Clock of the Long Now is just a hack, but The Rosetta Project looks to be actually useful, doing for languages what the Svalbard Seed Bank does for plant species.

WOWOWOW!

[jesse_the_k]

That project is fabulous and makes me breathe easier about humanity.

For future reference, the interactive Rosetta Disk is viewable from this link
http://rosettaproject.org/disk/interactive/

[jeshyr]

Thank you for writing about this! I'd heard of it before but at the time there was only one fanfic written - it's great to see more :)

[jesse_the_k]

Theoretically it should be a prompt for the centuries :,)

[sasha_feather]

Cool subject!

Strangely, your first link took me to the Ao3. (I figured it out though).

[jesse_the_k]

Zanx ... fixed.

[luzula]

I have read most of these! I actually also have a fic inspired by the same subject, Under the Mountain, though it was written before this turned into a Yuletide fandom, and I was inspired not by the WIPP thing, but by a review of a Finnish documentary called Into Eternity on the same subject. Er, I haven't actually seen the documentary though.

That's why I'm glad to know you

[jesse_the_k]

...you write fic about a movie you haven't seen. And I bet it's great!

And it IS great.

[jesse_the_k]

By linking the lurking unknown to trolls and dragons, it gave me the pleasant unsettling feeling that maybe we're the third-time's-a-charm try at human civilization?

Re: And it IS great.

[luzula]

Yay, you liked it!

Oooh, I never made that connection myself, but that's really intriguing.